As examples of agricultural crops to be dried in a drying facility after being harvested, there are rice and wheat. With a harvester (commonly called “a combine”) for harvesting rice or wheat, a harvesting work will proceed such that the harvester will reap stalks with its preprocessing unit while the harvester travels within a field having a predetermined reaping area and will feed these reaped stalks to a threshing unit for threshing and sorting them, after which grains obtained as a result of threshing and sorting will be stored in a grain tank of the harvester. When the grain tank is filled with grains, these grains will be removed therefrom to be loaded onto a transport vehicle such as a truck, which transports the grains to a drying facility for their drying processing. For keeping favorable quality of harvested crops such as grains, it is desired that the crops be dried on the same day as their harvesting. To this end, it is important that the ability of the drying facility for the drying processing be in equilibrium with a harvesting amount of the harvester that harvests the crops to be brought to this drying facility.
From Patent Document 1, there is known a combine equipped with a display monitor for displaying a harvested amount (yield) of grains per unit reaping area calculated by a calculation means based on a detection value from an unhulled rice sensor as a detection means for detecting a stored amount of grains stored in the grain tank during a reaping work-accompanied traveling. With this configuration, a driver can accurately grasp the harvested amount of grains per unit reaping area during a reaping work-accompanied traveling and can also estimate an amount of crops to be harvested in an un-reaped journey. Accordingly, with stopping the work rather than effecting any harvesting work in excess of a drying processing ability of a dryer center, grains stored in the grain tank can be removed therefrom and loaded onto a transport vehicle to be brought into the dryer center to be dried therein. However, such drier center is normally under management of a certain community, which center accepts grains not only from this particular combine, but also from other many combines. Therefore, if the harvesting work by one's own combine is planned based solely on a drying processing ability of the drier center which ability is known in advance, the drying processing may be inadvertently postponed until the next day of brining-in of the crops.
In order to allow a series works from a harvesting work to a drying processing to proceed in an efficient manner, there is known, from Patent Document 2, a combine equipped with a controller configured to obtain the total period from a reaping work to detection of filling of the tank by a grain sensor, as a required period and to output this required period as a control signal to an outputting side transmitter which then transmits the signal to a designated mobile phone. Therefore, a concerned worker standing by can know the initial total work period displayed on the mobile phone in reception of the information from start of reaping work to filling of the storage tank, so that the worker can estimate an approximate period required for the whole harvesting work until completion of harvesting of one-day harvesting target amount. With this, the concerned worker can effect preparation for the next process in timed accordance with the estimated period of completion of harvesting work. In doing this, the driver will start the work after setting the target harvesting amount to be harvested on that day by a target harvesting amount setting dial, thus causing a controller to store this as a set value. In this, this target harvesting amount will be determined based on a rated one-day drying amount of the drying facility. Namely, with this conventional technique too, the harvesting work by the combine of his/her own is planned based solely on the known drying processing ability of the drier center. Therefore, depending on congestion situation of the drier center, there may arise the possibility of the processing therein being postponed until the next day of brining-in of the grains.
From Patent Document 3, there is known a harvested crops management system which includes a transporter vehicle that transfers and transports harvested crops harvested by a harvester, a plurality of processing facilities that carry out processing such as drying of harvested crops transported therein, and information terminals installed in each one of these processing facilities and also in a management center, so as to allow mutual transmission of information via a communication network. According to this system, each processing facility will transmit to the management center, various processing facility information such as the kind of harvested crops processed therein, the processing ability, the acceptable amount, etc. and the transporter vehicle will receive information from the management center and can select a processing facility as the transport destination. Further, this Patent Document 3 discloses also that with transmission of a field location, an amount of harvested crops (or estimated time of full amount) either directly from the harvester to the transporter vehicle or via the management center during a harvesting work, a transporter vehicle can be assigned and sent to the harvester in an efficient manner. However, this Patent Document 3 fails to disclose any solution to the problem of how much a harvester should harvest if an amount of grains harvested on that day can be dried within this same day.